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McFarlane's art was first published in 1984 pencilling a backup feature for the comic book Coyote. He rose to prominence producing work for both Marvel Comics and DC Comics, on such books as Infinity Inc, The Incredible Hulk and Detective Comics. His style was a blend of popular artistic influences including popular but irregular pencillers like Michael Golden and Art Adams. He eventually became the artist for Marvel's The Amazing Spider-Man. Illustrating the stories of writer David Michelinie, McFarlane's style came to define the character of Spider-Man for the early 1990s. He left the title after a few years only to be given his own title to write and illustrate: Spider-Man #1, the fifth ongoing comic book featuring the character at the time, sold more than 2.5 million copies, due to successful marketing by Marvel including variant covers, bagged editions, and the dawn of the speculators market.
After a little more than a year producing Spider-Man, McFarlane took a hiatus from comics. During this time he and six other then-popular artists formed a new comic book company, Image Comics. Due to their inexperience with the publishing side of the business as well as writing the group was initially beset by production delays, incomprehensible scripts tying together loose collection of pin-ups and criticism from numerous reviewers. Despite these problems, McFarlane's title Spawn became one of the best-selling titles of the decade and has drawn the attention of a variety of licensers. McFarlane chose to create his own toy company in 1994. New Line Cinema made a feature film of his character and an animated series was broadcast on HBO.
McFarlane is an avid baseball fan, having briefly tried to achieve a pro career in the sport as a young adult. Following his success with Spawn, McFarlane was able to buy at auction multiple balls hit for home runs during the record-setting 1998 seasons of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, including Sosa's #33, 61 and 66 home run balls, and McGwire's #1, 63, 67, 68, 69 and 70 home run balls. (#61 represented the ball which tied Roger Maris' then-record, while #70 by McGwire set the new record - broken in 2001 by Barry Bonds.)
In late 2001, McFarlane revealed a new logo for the Edmonton Oilers NHL franchise of which he is a part-owner.